Shane Gregory - Associate Secretary

In this episode of the One Health Podcast, Dorian Broomhall gets to know Shane Gregory, Associate Secretary. 

Shane talks about his journey from him from digging holes in the road in a little country town to his current role. 

He speaks about how his love of problem-solving lead him to work in engineering and infrastructure. 

He explains how he views his role as being an enabler for those delivering services. 

And he tells us about how he came to understand the reason for having a Purpose and Values, and how we must do more than plaster those Values our walls.

Transcript

Dorian Broomhall:

Welcome to the One Health Podcast. This episode was recorded on the land of the Palawa people. I acknowledge and pay respect to all Tasmanian Aboriginal people and to their deep history of storytelling. My name's Dorian Broomhall and I'm the manager of culture and wellbeing for the Department of Health here in lutruwita, Tasmania. For this episode, I got to know Shane Gregory, our associate secretary. In our conversation, Shane talks about falling in love with engineering and problem solving and how that led him from digging holes in the road in a little country town to being Deputy Secretary for infrastructure, and now our Associate Secretary. He explains how he views many roles in our organisation, including his own, as being enablers for those delivering our key clinical services. And he tells us about how he came to understand the reason for having organisational purpose and values and how we must do much more than simply having those values displayed on our walls. We start every chat with the same question, so let's get into it. What did you want to be when you were in kindergarten?

Shane Gregory:

Well, I'll start with an interesting answer. I didn't go to kindergarten.

Dorian Broomhall:

Okay. That's the first response I've had to that question before.

Shane Gregory:

So I grew up in a very, very small country town where we just had a primary school with two classes, one to three and four to seven and 30 students. No kindergarten, no preschool. So what do I want to be at kindergarten? I probably didn't have much of an idea because I wasn't there. But growing up, I was really impressed with a primary school teacher, a principal of our school, one of two teachers in the school. He was like a role model for me, a male role model. Probably the first thing I wanted to be was a teacher. On reflection, that wouldn't have been a good career choice for me, I don't think. I probably don't have a lot of patience, so teaching probably wouldn't have been a great career choice for me, but that's what was my first career thing I aspired to be was a teacher.

Dorian Broomhall:

That's fascinating and I love that that was linked to not just a teacher, but the principal, the person that was there sort of setting the scene. Whereabouts are we? Paint the picture.

Shane Gregory:

We're in southeast South Australia in a little town called Kybybolite.

Dorian Broomhall:

Okay, there you go. Definitely not a town I've heard of. Is that down sort of south of Murray Bridge?

Shane Gregory:

Well south of Murray Bridge, yes. About three and a half hours south of Adelaide.

Dorian Broomhall:

You grew up in South Australia, rural South Australia. And did you chase the lights of Adelaide as the big smoke then, or what happened next?

Shane Gregory:

Not initially. I was pretty comfortable growing up in a country town, then moved to the neighbouring town when I was about 18. It was just personal circumstances that I followed love to Adelaide, to be honest, and that just then opened up opportunities for me and working in a... I was working for the government at the time, but working in a much larger part of the organisation and different opportunities and it was probably more of a life-changing experience than I realised at the time, sort of getting out of a very small country town and getting into a much bigger environment and meeting a lot of different people and seeing a lot of different things and just being exposed to a lot more.

Dorian Broomhall:

What was your professional background initially?

Shane Gregory:

Well, I went straight from high school into working for the state government, working in a field-related job. One of my friend's parents used to laugh that I worked for the Road Authority, but rather than fixing holes, I was out digging holes in the road doing materials testing. So that's how I started and then I went on to do study by correspondence to do social deployment in civil engineering and then went into road design and civil design, so that's my professional background.

Dorian Broomhall:

Yeah, fascinating. I broadly knew that you worked in infrastructure that that's obviously such a big open book of what does that even mean, but you really started boots on the ground and then almost the other way around to up school, yeah?

Shane Gregory:

Yeah, it was probably something I really fell into initially. In small country town you're looking, "Well, I need a job. I've just finished high school. I need something to do." And I got into it and actually found I really liked it. I really enjoyed engineering and sort of using my brain to think through things and problem-solving and something I really enjoyed and made a career of it basically.

Dorian Broomhall:

Interesting. So then you've got to Adelaide, expanded your horizon somewhat. One of the prettiest towns, I think, or cities in Australia, it's a cracking place to be. How long were you there for?

Shane Gregory:

I was in Adelaide for six years, worked there for six years. And again, I was probably fairly comfortable there and happy with life. I then met my now-wife. She was a Tasmanian studying at Flinders University and through that relationship she informed me that she didn't see Adelaide necessarily as being the place that she was going to live forever. And that also, it's an interesting environment to be in engineering in South Australia. You needed to be in the city, basically, and she was likely to have to go into the country to start her career.

So we made the call to find a place somewhere interstate and make a move, just fortuitously that ended up being Perth in Western Australia. I'd put the feelers out around the country to think about where we might go and we're probably thinking Queensland, something like that. And I got a call out of the blue from a national company that said, "Well, our other office has passed on your CV. Do you want to have a chat about a job?" They offered me a really interesting job and we did a little bit more research to find out that my wife's profession was in great demand in Perth, so things sort of fell together and up we went to WA.

Dorian Broomhall:

From the way you're speaking, it makes me think that perhaps you lived in WA for quite some time.

Shane Gregory:

Oh no, about four years, four and a half years. And when we started a family, even though my wife had initially thought she'd never moved back to Tasmania, once the family arrived, the pull of Tasmania was very strong. So we came here 23 years ago.

Dorian Broomhall:

Yeah, there you go. And then the roots did come. That's fascinating and I think that there's something to be said for so many of us Tasmanians who might grow up here and then go somewhere else for a while and then go, "Yeah, I might sort of come back." It's interesting that you chased love to Adelaide and then found different love, which was the right one. Sort of how I went to Melbourne, chased love, ended up finding a Melbourne girl and now we moved back here a few years ago, again, for her career choices for her to study nursing. And so we've been back here and just starting a family and I couldn't think of a better place to do it, really.

Shane Gregory:

Oh, it's a great place to live. It's changed a lot in the 23 years we've been here. It was very quiet when we came here in 2000 and it's really evolved. I think Tasmania's really matured in that time. There's a lot of things happening and the culture is really, really vast and grown and the food scene, everything's... It's changed quite dramatically. It was a good place to live then. It's a great place to live now.

Dorian Broomhall:

Yeah, I agree with that. When you moved to Tassie then 23 years ago, work-wise, back into the public service then or were you still working in private?

Shane Gregory:

Semi government, let's put it that way. I came down to work for government-owned contracting business to the spinoff from the old DMR at the time, so that's what I came down to do. I didn't really know what I was getting into probably, and it was an interesting organisation to work for.

Dorian Broomhall:

That idea of almost being an internal consultant, that's interesting, the skills that you can pick up and learn along the way there and understanding the broader context of the Tasmanian state service, I imagine, as you would've. And fast-forward to now, you are the Associate Secretary of the Department of Health. That's a long way from starting as essentially a field officer in the Southeast of South Australia. You've come a long way in your career in terms of where you started and perhaps what you might be doing now just simply in terms of job title. How did you find yourself over at the Department of Health in the first place?

Shane Gregory:

Well, I guess it's probably just been an interesting journey all the way. Sorry, maybe that's where to start. I've never been a person who's mapped out the future. I've never mapped out my career and said, "Well, I'll do this and I'll do that and I'll advance it here and there." It's really been a case of opportunities or personal decisions. Moving to Adelaide, moving to WA, they were very personal decisions and it was really starting in WA, just taking an opportunity. Something came along, an interesting opportunity and say, "Well, actually I wouldn't mind having a go at that." Personal decision to move to Tasmania. And then from there, it was really just opportunities and I like challenges. I describe myself as I'm probably a better reformer than I'm a maintainer in organisations and that just presented opportunities for me. The government business I came to work for was sold to the private sector three years after I arrived, and that was a really big opportunity for me because I got the opportunity to be the state manager for that business.

After about six years of doing that, I actually just needed pretty much a change of scenery and that was a pretty high pressure environment, so I just needed to do something different. And that's when I first came into the real government in Tasmania. And so I worked in the Department of State growth with a short private sector break in the middle. And I'd been in my latest job as running the state roads division of state growth for seven and a half years. And the opportunity came up in health, led an infrastructure team. It was a promotional opportunity and I just thought it was a good time to have a bit of a change, try something different, see if I could transfer my very much civil-based skills across to a different type of environment. And that's really how I arrived here as the Deputy Secretary of Infrastructure in February 2020.

Dorian Broomhall:

Interesting timing, of course. I'm really interested in that transfer of skills from the civil scope of infrastructure to how we might think of infrastructure in health. And I suspect for many people who work in our organisation probably don't even consider what infrastructure entails, but it's quite a big portfolio if you think about it. Talk us through what that actually means to look after that from a deputy secretary point of view.

Shane Gregory:

Well, I think in terms of transfer of skills, what's important is when you are down in the level of designing and building things, there's quite a different skill set between civil and buildings. The skill sets are very different. The people who design and build roads are not the same people who design and build buildings and hospitals and stuff. But once you work progress through project management and programme management, you are using a pretty common set of skills and it's about managing the scope of the project, the time, the cost, the quality, and making sure things happen. So that's a fairly universal skill set that you can take across not even just infrastructure, a whole range of projects. It's a fairly universal skill set and risk management is a key part of that as well. In health, infrastructure is essentially managing the whole built asset. So it's the whole life cycle, it's planning, building, then maintaining infrastructure through its whole life cycle.

So for us, that's about 400 sites across the state varying from a CHAPS facility in effectively a house, what was formerly a house, through to the Royal Hobart Hospital. It's the whole range of things and the management task varies quite a lot. So obviously managing a very small standalone facility, it doesn't have the complexity obviously that something like the Royal does and the Royal Hobart Hospital not just the structure of the building but all the building systems, the water supply, electricity, medical gases, so it's a very broad portfolio. And in health we also add into that management of properties in terms of leasing properties in and out, managing medical equipment and vehicle fleet as well. So that all comes in the infrastructure portfolio.

Dorian Broomhall:

I think you think health, right, and you think front-facing clinicians and obviously rightly so, of course you're going to think about that. For them to be able to do their job properly, it takes so many other people with so many other skills and professions, much like you've sort of just mentioned here. How do you go about sharing some of those stories to people that don't really understand what it means to work in infrastructure, in health? Anything to share there?

Shane Gregory:

Well, it's probably something we haven't done very well. Obviously the last few years with COVID, everyone's been very busy getting on with what they do. I like to take the opportunity whenever there's a conversation, we're talking to people about infrastructure to try and spread that story out and just talk about, well, what are we trying to do here? When we've been out talking about the strategic priorities with the secretary, when it comes to the bit about building the health infrastructure for our future, I like to talk about, well, what's the purpose of infrastructure and why is it here and what are all the things that are involved in it, and let people really know that infrastructure is an enabler for delivering a service, whether you're talking about hospitals or roads or water supply systems, it doesn't matter.

It's an enabler for delivering a service. It's very rare that the infrastructure is the end game in itself. So yeah, just along the way take the opportunity to talk to people about that. It can be challenging because a lot of the time you've got people's attention for a pretty short period of time and they really want to talk about when they're getting their thing. So it can be challenging to get them to think bigger.

Dorian Broomhall:

That frame of being an enabler for a service, I think it's a really nice way to think about it because when you think about, say, the Healthcare 2040 and that whole piece, we're thinking about, we're trying to plan for the future, which has always got its risks, because you never really know. But being able to design that infrastructure for a service that we don't exactly know what we're going to need, but therefore we need to enable options, I suppose. I think that's a really interesting way to think about it and certainly makes the space sound a lot more interesting from my perspective.

Shane Gregory:

I think there are a lot of things that we do. A lot of areas of the organisation are enablers, so obviously we have the frontline staff as you mentioned, that are out there delivering a service. And in the background we have a lot of enablers. We have infrastructure, we have HR, we have pay, we have IT. And without all of those things, we can't do what we need to do. So there's a lot of people working to help deliver the service. There's a lot involved here and everything's really got to come together to work. We are quite often looking at longer term timeframes around, say, IT and infrastructure than we necessarily are around service delivery. A lot of what our staff do in a hospital is very now, it's about making sure that the person who's just walked in the door is treated and looked after, and the demands on our system are changing a lot, quite frequently.

We see COVID as the pandemic arrives and suddenly the world has changed very quickly. But in infrastructure, we are looking at 20, 30-year timelines and trying to marry those two things together can become quite interesting. So we do need to have a long-term plan. You can't go without a plan. If you don't have a plan, you're not doing things efficiently, you're not spending your money wisely, and you end up doing a lot of things that you look back and go, "Well, actually that was a waste of time or money. We shouldn't have done that." But it's about how you marry that long term and the short term, good asset management versus good health and good healthcare delivery on two different timelines. Bring those together and it is about building some flexibility into what you do, the ability to adapt and know that your 20-year infrastructure plan is probably not going to be delivered because somewhere along the way you'll have to change it. We have to be fairly flexible and agile, but still have the principles on whole of life asset management and long-term planning.

Dorian Broomhall:

You've explained that really well. I love that tension between, as you say, you've got to have a plan and we've also got to deliver things right now. It's a wonderful tension to hold. Now, more recently you've stepped into this position of Associate Secretary. Would you mind explaining what that role is or perhaps how that role is playing out now that you've been operating in it for a few months?

Shane Gregory:

So the role of Associate Secretary came about really on the back of the COVID demands within the state service, then the Commission of Inquiry and Reforms and a whole range of things that have to happen within the state service and things we're responding to. And if you look at particularly the big organisations, health, education and perhaps not the biggest but fairly complex is DPAC, the demands on the Secretary have just grown and grown and grown to the point that it's extremely difficult for the head of an agency to be across everything and deal with the workload. The workload is quite remarkable. How much is there? So the Associate Secretary role was developed by DPAC, signed off by the Premier, to enable heads of agencies to say, "Well, I need some assistance. I need someone who can operate at nearly a 2IC level," but it's not that structure to really pick up some of the load and provide support.

I think it's fair to say that when the role was created, the view was to help and take some of the load, but every agency needed to try and find its own balance and mix of how that works. So the Secretary and I have talked through and we continue to really touch base on things that she wants me to do or bits she wants me to take the leadership on. And it's a little bit more fluid, I think, for us than perhaps it may be in other agencies. It's given me a great opportunity to see more of what happens within health, within the organisation, and get a broader understanding of how things work. And it really is a learning experience for me after 37 years or 38 years in infrastructure to have this much broader view has been very interesting. So at the moment it's been working well and I guess it's probably a case of with two halves of the team, Secretary is still our leader and the figurehead and carries the organisation foot and I'm there to support her, really.

Dorian Broomhall:

It's a nice way to look at it, almost an analogy of almost like a dance partner springs to mind rather than always having one person leading. You take it, you swing, depending on what the thing is, but you're still operating with one another and you probably couldn't do it without one another anymore, I wouldn't have thought.

Shane Gregory:

Yeah, look, it's really about taking what's a massive load and trying to distribute that. And I see my role very much to support the Secretary, to be there to pick up probably quite a few day-to-day things that frees up her time to think about perhaps some more strategic things, a higher priority, things to deal with that. But also there are certain projects and activities that she asked me to take on and say, "Well you can push that along and deal with that." So it is an interesting analogy of dance partners, but I think it is important that you have a good relationship. I'm not sure how it could work if you weren't talking closely and working very closely together

Dorian Broomhall:

And that safety to be able to speak and share your mind and really be able to be open when your perspectives and, ideally, disagree. I think disagreeing is something that by and large we don't do very well in our country. We are often very polar in our thinking, it's black or it's white. But as you've sort of articulated right throughout everything you've said so far, often things are a bit grey and we need to be okay with a little bit of both through some of the work that we're doing, considering the culture of the organisation, it's something that we're trying to encourage, safe ways for people to disagree. Now, I've observed your team, if you like, the health executive, operate a few times, and I have to say that the quality of conversation from that ability for people to speak their mind is very strong. How do you go about supporting that culture where people can actually speak their mind and disagree in a way that's actually constructive?

Shane Gregory:

Look, I think this is actually one of the biggest challenges we face in any organisation. And I think you're right, people tend to see things as either you agree with me or you're against me. And Tasmania is actually very good at this. You look at any number of debates and there's way over here and way over there, and we tend to be very polarised around debates. That's something I've noticed since I've been in Tasmania. I think there's a maturity that we have to develop ourselves. I'm not sure you can teach people. I think it's about learning that we can have different views of the world and I can disagree with you, but if I do that respectfully, that's okay. If I'm going to yell at you or abuse you, then that process can't work. But I've got to be able to say, "Well, actually no, I don't agree with what you're saying and I've got a different view of that."

I think it is one of the biggest challenges for all of us to do that. And I think it's challenging for people who come into management positions to understand that it will be challenged and we should be challenged. In the management roles I've been in, I've always said to my team, "You feel free to challenge me. You feel free to tell me if you don't think I'm living up to the values or if I've said something in a meeting that I haven't done in the right way, feel free to come and talk to me about that or you've got a different view about a project or something we're working on," but it's about how you do it. If you come in and slam the door, that conversation's probably not going to go very well. So I think there's a bit of learning and I think there's a bit of trust.

There's a trust element as well to know that I can have this conversation with you and it is a conversation between us and we don't use this conversation against each other down the track. How do you set the environment? I think you've really just got to allow people to express their views and acknowledge that you've got to behave in a respectful way, and I think also call people out when they don't.

And I think there's also an element of understanding that if someone disagrees with you, it's not an attack on you and we can have different views. So sometimes I think we need to have a little bit thicker skin when we have some of the conversations because people can take it very personally if you disagree with them, you're attacking them. Particularly if they put a lot of work into something, we've all got to accept that I might've done a lot of work on something and my manager says, "Well, that's great, but that's not where I want to go." Or, "I think you've got this wrong." So that's something I have to accept, but also accept that there's a way of saying it.

Dorian Broomhall:

I imagine in your career you've had any number of different sets of values that an organisation might've put up and said, "Well, these are our sets of values." And I guess I'm curious from your perspective and with your experience, what do we need to do to really embed these values of compassion, accountability, respect, and excellence in right for our organisation?

Shane Gregory:

I'll make a confession to start with. I never really understood this. I never really understood mission, vision, values, the whole... I never really got it. I sat in... I remember sitting in a meeting actually not long after I came to Tasmania and it was a business planning exercise. And for about three hours we debated the vision, we didn't get to the mission, we just debated the vision for about three hours and it became this incredible document that was nearly like a novel in itself. And I just never really understood how all this came together and what it was meant to be. And after the government business was sold to the private sector, I remember being in a management meeting where my manager started talking about a book called Built to Last, and he said he recommended the reading to all of his management team. And so I went and got it and I read, and it all just made sense after that because that particular text talked about... It didn't talk about mission and vision, it talked about what's your purpose, what's your reason for existing, why is your organisation here?

And that just made sense to me. It really made sense. And then building on that, well, once you understand why you're here, how do you go about doing business and that's your values. So it all just made sense to me then, and I was able to take those concepts from that private sector business into government when I first went into government. And then I really relied on those concepts very heavily when we did a major restructure and redirection of the roads area in state growth. And one of the things I've really held onto out of that reading as well is you've got to have a common set of values. It doesn't really matter that much what they are, as long as everyone knows what they are and everyone buys into them and you stick fast to them. And that text talked about the fact that you can change your purpose, you can change what you do, but the values should be pretty consistent and you continue on.

And the other lesson for me out of that was you've got to live the values. You can't just talk about them. You can't just have them on the wall. You've actually got to live them. And to the point that when someone comes into your organisation, one of the first things you talk to them about is, "This is who we are, this is why we're here, and this is how we go about doing our business. These are our values." And so that's the approach. I think you've just got to continually talk about it. The values should be referenced in your recruiting, your statement of duties, onboarding of people, "This is what our values are about." And that's one of the things we did in the state growth and the road space. Every new starter had a half an hour with me as the general manager where I didn't talk about the roads programme or payroll or where you went to buy lunch or any of that sort of stuff.

I just talked about the values, why we existed as an organisation, and what our values were, and that's how we wanted to conduct ourselves in business. And it takes a while. You've really got to keep talking about it and keep talking about it, and as a leader, I think, be prepared to be called out as well and encourage people, say to people, "They're the values. If you don't think I'm living up to them, then let me know. Point out to me where you think I'm getting off track." I think that's really important. And I think for me, there were a couple of really important moments where I knew we were being successful where one day someone did say, "Well, I think in that meeting you didn't live up to the values." And that was a reflection to go back say, "Okay, how could I do that differently? What did I do there that didn't sort of send the message that was consistent with what our values were?"

And the other one was a story that was relayed to me where there was a meeting that I wasn't in and someone made a comment and another person said, "No, hang on. That's not how we do business. That's not consistent with our values." So I think there were a couple of things that sort of said we got some success, but that took a couple of years to get to that point of just constantly reinforcing the values and talking to people about it, and being prepared to act when someone wasn't living up to the values. I had the situation where I had to talk to a senior manager.

Dorian Broomhall:

It was interesting coming into this organisation and basically having on your list, "Well, we don't have values, so as part of the culture piece, can you go away and get that sort of sorted?" And as someone who's been perhaps a little bit cynical about the value of values to date in my career, it's been a really interesting experience to go through a consultation, speaking with people, understanding where our organization's at, what they would like, but then also getting our perspective from our leaders about, "Well, hang on. This is where we'd like our organisation to be even if we're not there yet," and looking at the way that we can start to marry these couple of pieces up. I think from my own perspective, it's been wonderful just to learn how we can start this journey. As you rightly say, it's going to take some time, but through the process of starting the journey, I think we've gone some way to actually really start to build, hopefully, start to build that trust of how the organisation might choose to come along. It's been really interesting for me from those perspectives.

Shane Gregory:

Couple more things I'd say about values. I think, like goals, values as you're trying to develop and strive for goals or develop a series of values, they shouldn't necessarily make you feel comfortable. It shouldn't be about the kind of organisation you want to have. It's not about making us feel happy. I think that by achieving goals and getting the organisation consistently offering to a set of values, you do create a good place to be and a good place to work. So I think they've got to test us a little bit, the values. And I think the other thing I've learned is not everyone will buy into the values or like the values, and they may then determine that, "Well, actually this is probably not the organisation for me. Perhaps I should be somewhere else because this isn't the organisation I want to be." That's not a reflection poorly on the organisation, it just may be that person's individual view of the world doesn't fit with where you need to be.

The other thing I would say about values is we always like to project the values out and say, "Well, Dorian, you're not living up to the values." But I think that the really important part of values is that I hold myself to account against the values. That's where it should start. Before I start reaching out and saying, "Well, I don't think this person's living to the values or that person's living to the values." That's a little bit of looking inside and say, "Am I comfortable that I'm living to the values? Is there something I could be doing better?" And then yeah, I can start to test people a little bit. But also, if I'm living the values then I can just project that out. If we're all going into a meeting and the majority of people in that room are sort of thinking about the values and holding themselves to account about the values, well then you just get this by association. Everyone will start to come along on the journey.

Dorian Broomhall:

I like that idea of self-accountability and actually we need to start there and for all of us to just take stock, go, "Where am I at today?" And actually, if you discover that you're not nailing it today, perhaps that's okay too. Go, "Okay, that's interesting. I probably need to do something different now." But that is the same, as you talked about calling people out so to speak. It's sort of okay if you go off track, it's about the support, what happens next, that idea then for our people, our managers, everybody to be able to go, "Oh, hang on. We're not going to persecute this person for going off track. We're going to find the way to support them." You know what I mean?

Shane Gregory:

Yeah. I think that's really important. Everyone has a bad day, whatever it might be. You've had an argument before you left home or you just got a shocking bill from the mechanic or whatever it might be. It could be that something really traumatic's happened in your life and you're trying to cope with all of that. So everybody has a bad day. Sometimes you're just tired, you didn't sleep well last night. So I think they're the times when it's very difficult for us as individuals to be thinking about the values because we're consumed by whatever is affecting us today. Just making sure we can get back on track. And I think as colleagues, just going, "I think you seem a bit off today. Is everything okay?" And realising that you snapped at me, which is out of character and that, "Oh, well, I'm really offended because you've thrown the values out the door," but recognising this is not how that particular person conducts themselves normally.

So I think you're cutting a little bit of slack and going, "Well, there's obviously something going on. I might have a quiet chat tomorrow. Is everything okay?" So I think it's about understanding the environment people are in and they're not supporting the values, and if someone's consistently behaving contrary to the values, well that's when you have the harder conversation.

Dorian Broomhall:

So somewhat related to this then you spoke before, I think you used the term remarkable to describe the workload of a Secretary, and I think that's a really powerful word to use to consider that. And I suspect that what's on your desk is probably not enormously trivial compared to that either. I'm really interested how do you look after yourself? How do you... Switch off is perhaps the wrong word, because I don't think, again, it needs to be binary. Workers possibly always are constant to a degree, and I think that that can be okay if it's a conscious choice too. Then how do you take care of yourself in that sort of full puzzle?

Shane Gregory:

I've been asked a question before about work-life balance and how do you achieve it? And I think the answer to that is, well, that really depends on you. I think it's very much up to you and if you ask this question you'll have a whole range. Everyone will have a different view. So what I try to do is deal with work at work. So I'm happy to come in early and stay late with the view that when I go home, I've done my day's work. That's what I try to do. And I know there are other members of the executive team who will come in later and leave earlier, but they'll go home and they'll do a few hours at home. I try not to do that. I'd rather stay at work and work back an hour or two here if that's what's required.

So that's just me. I like to compartmentalise. I think that's the key for me. And so I try and keep weekends for recharging. It doesn't always work because things will happen and you have to deal with things and respond, but that's my preferred approach. The other thing I think is really useful is to have someone you can go and debrief with and when the day's just got a little bit on top of you, just someone or something's frustrating you just someone you can go and talk to, someone you feel safe talking to. Various times in my career, that's been one of my team that I've felt that I can have this conversation and I know this is a conversation that's me downloading, debriefing. Sometimes it's been someone outside the work environment. I think that's pretty useful just to... Sometimes we just need to download and get stuff off our chest.

I think that's an important thing. It's not a sort of a bitch session, but it's just I've got to talk about it and get rid of it. But that's not something I do at home, so I tend not to work home. So I don't download with my family, I tend to find someone that I can download with. And the other thing that I do, and I've talked to a few managers over the years around a metaphorical walk in the park. It's time to go for a walk in the park. Now that doesn't mean going across to St. David's Park and wandering around in the trees. It may, but it simply might be just go for a walk, get out of the office for 15 minutes, go for a walk, go and grab a coffee, just go and do something to get out of the environment where right at the moment, my head's not in the right space.

So I have to say I've got a couple of managers I've said to them, "Yeah, you need a walk in the park." I don't want to go for a walk in the park, but it's not actually going for a walk in the park. It's just time out. It's taking a break.

Dorian Broomhall:

Something that we know that is a real challenge in our environment, in our organisation, which we're not unique at all, is people seem to struggle with this idea of having difficult conversations or approaching some of these conversations. We've talked around the edges about this a little bit over the course of this conversation as well. If you know that you need to have a conversation with somebody, whether it's performance or behaviour related or you need to give them some feedback or whatever it might be, anything that you sort of think about in your preparation for that? Anything that you've learned over your time of what not to do or what to do for that matter?

Shane Gregory:

Look, I think the important thing for me, like a watershed moment, was understanding it's not enjoyable. And people will say, "Oh, well no, I really don't like having those conversations." Well, I'll give you the hot tip, nobody likes having them, but they have to be done. And I think you should be worried if you start to enjoy difficult conversations. I think you probably need a walk in the park if that's the case. But I think the key is actually just sitting down and beforehand and understanding why you're having the conversation. What are the key points you need to make? So preparing, I think that's the key. You say, what do you do to prepare? Well, it's just preparing. The last thing you want to do is go in, sit down with someone and have a difficult conversation and not have your thoughts organised. I think that's really important.

And also accept that the person you're having the conversation with is going to have a different view to you. They're going to have a completely different perspective. They may not even understand that there's an issue, so you've got to be prepared and clear about what you want to talk about, but also retain that flexibility to hear what the person has to say. And then you may find during that conversation that, in fact, there's a completely different issue to what you thought. Or you may be talking to someone who's going through something in their personal life that is impacting on their performance or their behaviour, and rather than heading down a path of a performance improvement or disciplinary action, what you're then swinging into is a support mechanism to actually assist them and help them through a troubling pattern.

I think firstly, understanding that conversations are not pleasant and they're not enjoyable and nobody likes doing them. I can guarantee you that the Secretary doesn't like doing them either, but understand they have to happen and then be flexible and be really clear. If you don't have the difficult conversations, nothing's going to change. Things are going to continue and probably get worse.

Dorian Broomhall:

Thank you so much. Thanks for sharing your perspectives. Appreciate you taking the time to have a chat.

Shane Gregory:

Thanks Dorian.

Dorian Broomhall:

Cheers. Thank you to Shane Gregory, Associate Secretary, for taking time to speak with us and to you for listening. I hope you found something in our conversation that you can take away and apply into your own work. You can read more about the process and thinking behind our Department of Health's purpose and CARE Values on our intranet page. Join me again for our next episode when I speak with Paula Hyland, Chief Executive of Hospitals, North West.